Time isn't always time

Hi guys,

I’m writing to you with a runny nose and a sore throat. 🤧 It’s that time of the year again, I guess. But also good times because I’m writing this next to my cozy fireplace. I am feeling really 'writery,' like a real writer and all.

Last week I was visiting New York with my family. There was sunshine and it was great! Yesterday I posted on my Linkedin feed that Greek people have two words for TIME:
Chronos is the time you see ticking away on the clock. 
Kairos is more about quality time. Where we can let go time, be inspired and act. I was ‘busy’ with Kairos. I had quality time with my family 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦.

The consequence, though, is that I'm jetlagged, and I'm a day late with this newsletter. 😱 I could stress about it, or... I'll just accept that I'm doing my best.

Btw, this Branding Donkeys Newsletter is sent every week until I decide to stop. Please forward this to ONE friend today and tell them either to subscribe here or to be more curious about life. 👋

Let’s talk about sales

Did I already tell you that I’m starting a new assignment today?! I will be helping the marketing department of this tech festival in Leuven: FTI and&. (Note it in your agendas, people!) This will be a project spanning several days each week. I’ll tell you more about it later. I'm also juggling shorter assignments for Herita, House of Weddings, etc. (Will you be next? :-) If you need my help, just reply to this email or contact me at [email protected] — I know, tHinKManAGemeNT is a really dull name! But that’s the name of the company I share with my lovely, but geeky husband 🤷‍♀️💛

So let’s talk sales.
Mine is obviously going well. Haha
How do I do this? By writing this newsletter next to my fireplace. Duh 😁 
And posting on Linkedin!

People buy from people. Anyone can create a product or service and make it available for sale – that isn't the hard part. The hard part is convincing a potential buyer to trade their cash for it. So, you will need to have built trust with your potential customer. And build your network.

Have you built enough trust with someone that they would buy from you? I purposefully said "someone" and not "an audience" because you don't need to have built trust at scale yet – you just need to have built enough genuine trust and credibility with a single person in order to make a sale.

We can't buy from you if we don't know you exist, we likely won't buy from you if we don't like you, and even if we do like you, we still need to trust that you will deliver a true solution for our problems or desires.

That's a pretty high bar! And it’s something that a lot of people forget. You are a smart engineer with a good business idea? Not enough, baby. How will you sell it? By building trust. You don't build that type of relationship at the snap of your fingers – people are careful about who they trust. The best way to accelerate trust is with TIME spent together. That may be direct, 1:1 time in person, in video, or on the phone. Or that may be time spent with you and your content. That’s obviously my preferred choice.

Brand Love

You see how investing time is something? It became the main theme of this newsletter and it wasn’t even on purpose. Another theme here is my sore throat and how Ricola once had a genius campaign for its cough candy.
Can we have a round of applause for the copy of this ad please? 👏 

This ad was created in 2014 by a group of students at Miami Ad School. Notice the tagline ‘Make sure good news sounds like good news’.
I don’t know about you, but it made me laugh really hard!

Books I read

1. While I was in New York, I read the biography of Matthew Perry, aka Chandler - one of the "Friends" actors whom I really really like. I'm a big fan of the show. Our dog is even named Joey because, like the character, he doesn't share food.
   In the biography, Perry talks about achieving all his goals but still feeling unhappy and struggling with alcohol and addiction. It made me think—it's not just about reaching goals (because he reached them all) it's mostly about the journey. The man died last week. Can this be more sad (If you know Chandler, you know how to read this phrase!)
   

2. The second book I read—It was a long flight, people, going there and back :-)—is the new novel by Zita Theunynck. It has nothing to do with business, branding, or entrepreneurship. This book is a genuine novel with storytelling skills you can learn from. It helps that Zita is a copywriter and scenarist, and her father is also an author. But every story she tells, every sentence she builds, is well-thought-out and connects. And also, it is funny, and sad. And than funny again. I'm not talking about the subject of the book—it's about babies and not having babies and then having twins. But the way she writes inspires me tremendously. It’s like a puzzle that connects everything. So beautiful. Go and read it!

See you next week!
(Ow, and if you feel the urge to reply, don’t fight it, just do so! It is nice to get some feedback or a simple hallo 👏)

x Ingrid